Revolutionaries Turned Writers: A Secular Left-Wing Habitus

Abstract

Writing civil war novels is of course not merely a question of greed and vanity and a reckless pursuit of symbolic capital. In fact, if you ask any Lebanese writer, what they strive for are good novels, rather than fame and fortune. Their choices, thematic and formal, are cast as matters of aesthetic preferences, technique, personal persuasions, and often quite simply inexplicable, flowing from the genius of the “uncreated creator.” In other words, what to write and how to write are conceived as questions of personal taste. Yet, as Bourdieu has famously shown in his major work Distinction (2010), taste is not an exclusively personal matter. This is where the writers’ habitus comes into play: as a set of dispositions and tastes acquired as a function of a person’s social origin and life trajectory, the habitus plays a formative role in shaping the authors’ (artistic) choices in a largely unconscious process (Bourdieu, 2006, pp. 261–265; 2010, pp. 165–170). The values of the literary field that define legitimate writing and legitimate writers, for instance, are part of this habitus and as such they have been internalized; core beliefs like the belief in the uncreated creator have been instilled into the authors from the very beginning of their formal education. An author’s tastes, her or his criteria for quality are not theirs alone but the tastes of a wider group.